Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Earthlink wins case against spammers

ZDNet reports that the two men charged in a lawsuit Earthlink filed have pleaded guilty. They now face up to three years in jail and up to $250,000 in fines.

The two were identified in an investigation last year by EarthLink's fraud and abuse team into activity at its PeoplePC subsidiary. The team discovered more than 25,000 junk e-mails had been sent through 10 PeoplePC accounts that originated from Miami. The e-mails contained such subject headers as "I'm finally back home" and "I just got back in town," and contained messages that marketed herbal supplements.

The fines in this instance are interesting since they are pretty high considering the article states 25,000 messages were sent. Normally they are catching people sending out millions, so it would seem these two guys were small time. I didn't read the actual case, so perhaps their herbal supplement spams broke other laws themselves - being actual scams instead of "just" unsolicited email.

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